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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (190962)	7/5/2006 9:58:17 AM
From: Elroy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

No... because we are war with their organization, Al Qai'da, which declared war and attacked the United States. How do you know any of them are members of Al Qaeda? That lawyer in that article that I posted to you earlier claimed that 8% of them were members of Al Qaeda. The article is in this week's Economist. But personally speaking, these guys were involved/affiliated with an organization that declared war upon the US. You have no way of knowing this. Of all the people in Afghanistan when the coalition invaded, what % were not involved or affiliated with Al Qaeda? The problem with your analysis is you define the detainees as a certain category ("they were involved with or supported Al Qaeda") with zero proof that that is a fact. Zero. At the very least, the detainers (us!) have the obligation to prove that the basis of their detention ("they are affiliated or involved with Al Qaeda") is correct. Yet that proof likely doesn't exist, or our government would provide it for the world to see....

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (190962)	7/8/2006 5:00:34 PM
From: GPS Info	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hello Hawk, Thanks for information in your reply. I needed to reread your post several times, but I still could not find the reason why we needed or still need Gauntanamo. My view has been this prison was set up as an interrogation facility more than as a detention center. I’ve read some fairly brutal practices by a former inmate who had volunteered for spy for the CIA while he was still in Afghanistan. He did a 20-minute piece on 60 Minutes some time ago. I had also heard that the officer in charge of interrogation methods at Gitmo moved to Abu Ghraib to help soften up the detainees before questioning. It’s good the read that “these guys are not being mistreated” as you state in your post. I would suppose that Rumsfeld’s comment of that the suicides there could only be due to tactics of asymmetrical warfare, and not because of mistreatment. But the Red Cross doesn't catch any blame for permitting these suicides to occur by denying US prison managers the ability to prevent them. I wouldn’t blame the Red Cross; I’d blame the person who actually committed suicide. That is, unless the Red Cross encouraged them to commit suicide, but I hope that’s not the case. And a number of detainees who have been released later were involved in Jihadist activities: …Maulvi Abdul Ghaffar, Abdullah Mehsud, Airat Vakhitov and Rustam Akhmyarov. Again, I can not see the logic of these former prisoners having anything to do with the justification for the “legal limbo.” Suppose we had a prison in Afghanistan or Iraq and we treated all detainees as prisoners of war from the beginning, and we then released these four guys for the exact same reasons that they were released from Gitmo. They go on to do very bad things. How does this alter the justifications behind having a Gitmo or a regular military prison? This is what I can’t tie together. Elroy had the same issue with this point in a later post. My first guess is that on US soil, we would be bound by a “fair and speedy trial” for the detainees. If we couldn’t charge them with a US or international crime, we would have to release them. I really think that we are smarter than this, but I’ve been mistaken before. If we can pull Noriega out of Panama and charge him with drug dealing, we should be able to charge these guys with conspiracy to commit murder of American citizens. I read recently that in international law, we can’t charge conspiracy. We know AQ wants war with the US through terror tactics, and we can say the Taliban aided and abetted AQ. We should be able to charge everybody with something. These are murky legal questions that risk their being exonerated and released, and then free to recommence their activities. My feeling is that we made these questions as murky as possible, so that we would not be bothered by legal niceties like the Geneva Convention. As an aside, I’ve been falling further and further behind on my reading of this board, but I will try to look for new email if you have more details for me. I’ll probably reply during the weekends. You also seemed to suggest that there are times when we (the US) have little choice but to torture someone for information that may help save (American?) lives. When someone is tortured and they give information that ultimately saves lives, I try very hard to look the other way. However, my problem comes from knowing how many people were tortured to get some information that we wanted and we failed to save lives. That is a horror I DO NOT want to place on soldiers or civilian interrogators. From J. Chris Parsons’ post: Months ago, almost unreported in the American mainstream media, there came a study saying that as many as 25 percent of U.S. combat troops over there believe they have killed innocent people. Imagine coming home and living the rest of your life with that ghastly belief. I pray that we win this war of ideas and values, without losing our ideals and values. The worst possible outcome is to lose the war and our values. Best to you